Photograph by Arthur Witman, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri
Certain figures from the Great Depression—dark-jawed hobos and apple-sellers, Dorothea Lange’s Okie mother, touching her chin as if noticing a toothache, comforting her small and rumpled daughters—are now so clichéd, their suffering looks quaint. Yes, we say, things were bad, but people knew how to can tomatoes back then. They didn’t take drugs. They went to church. Maybe they had to live in a house made of pallets, with Post Toasties boxes for wallpaper, but they didn’t bust up the family unit! In reality, it was so bad, tailors switched to zippers, because they couldn’t afford buttons. And people took plenty of drugs, if they could get their hands on them. They also lived in sewer pipes and ate dandelions and pigweed. And when there was no money for a divorce, a man would just walk out his back door one night, and keep walking till he got to Chicago. Mothers couldn’t walk out the back door, but when desperate, they emancipated themselves in other ways—maybe with whiskey, or by refusing to get out of bed, or by worrying until they saw devils crawling inside the lath in the walls.
Some kids ended up in the streets, picking through trash heaps. Others had their faces wiped off with a dirty washcloth and were dropped at an orphanage. That’s where this little girl is; the paper tag tied to her bedpost indicates her name is Sue. Her tea set is very much of its era, parading its resilience (Rust-proof! Sanitary!), rather than boasting how pretty, how delicate it is. Snow White appears on the side of the box, not holding a singing bluebird on her finger, but prostrate, grief-stricken, woodland creatures creeping out of the undergrowth with looks of great concern on their faces. Even Santa looks a little grubby, as if he’d just flown through the black blizzard of dust roiling over the Great Plains. But she doesn’t see that. Maybe she knows other kids were lucky to get a pair of socks and a pack of gum. Maybe she thought, even with a hurt foot, how could you be sad with a doll and a tea set? Or maybe she was just one of those loving people who, whether you happen to be Santa Claus or the mailman, gazes into your face as if it were the cosmos itself.
